We held our breath for a day as Web citizens took Apple’s new Safari browser for a test drive. Safari is obviously built for speed, with a number of optimizations made to its Konqueror-based rendering engine to boost its performance well beyond that of Mac IE5 and Mozilla variants.

However, we also hear that Safari’s CSS support leaves much to be desired, and await news of the level of support for DOM and JavaScript. Safari also identifies itself in part as Mozilla/Gecko (the user-agent string actually contains “like Gecko”), potentially confounding many browser-sniffing scripts in use. If you’re currently using any tricks to hide CSS from Konqueror, you may consider adding “Safari” to that as well.

Luckily, both praise and complaints spread quickly across the Web community, and the Safari developers are listening. Expect to see this new beastie appear in your server logs as thousands of Mac users jump to Safari to escape the numbing slowness of other OS X browsers. Meanwhile, we’ll keep an eye on this new browser as it moves from beta to final release.